TL;DR: Gone are the days of ATSs making candidates feel like they’ve been transported back to the early world wide web.

You don’t have to be in the recruiting field to know about the outdated look and feel of applicant tracking systems, or ATSs. Although you may not hear candidates ever speak the letters “ATS,” they’ve been complaining about the online job search and apply experience for quite some time—even more-so recently as a growing number take their job search mobile.

We’re on a mission to provide candidates with the best possible experience. Because technology and user expectations never cease to evolve, this is a mission that never ends. But our latest advancement, Jibe ATS Bridge, makes it simpler than ever for employers to move past the limitations of their ATS, and more importantly, keep pace with candidate expectations.

Let’s talk about how we got to the point of candidates dreading the task of finding a job online and why Jibe ATS Bridge is vital to overcoming that.

Candidate Experience with Legacy ATSs

The world’s largest employers started deploying ATSs years ago in order to manage applicant volume, compliance, personal information, and lots of other back-office aspects involved in the recruiting process. For this reason, many refer to the ATS as the backbone of recruiting. Any recruiter knows that ATSs actually work quite well as systems of record.

Where they fall short is in serving as a system of engagement. All that applicant information has to get into the ATS some way. That medium is the online search and apply feature of the ATS. While an employer may have the greatest career site in the world, there are few options for avoiding that well-known jump to the standard, unbranded, Windows 95-esque ATS.

Perhaps the way ATS search and apply experiences look and perform was acceptable one day—before most of today’s digitally-savvy candidates had to find jobs. But as technology standards continue to reach new heights, the gap between the quality consumer experiences candidates have come to expect and online job search experiences is widening.

In 2016, though, the challenge with candidate experience and ATSs goes beyond the search and apply process. Candidates are becoming more sophisticated. The meaning of “job searching” is expanding. And recruiters are responding (or want to respond) by focusing on recruitment marketing. That means jobs that get found in Google search, candidate nurturing strategies, and so on. The ATS doesn’t make this easy.

Enter Jibe’s New ATS Bridge

A main focus at Jibe since our inception has been ATS integration—unlocking the value of the largest ATSs: Oracle Taleo, IBM Kenexa, PeopleSoft, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse, ADP VirtualEdge, and the like. ATS Bridge is the most advanced solution to that challenge on the market to date.

ATS Bridge makes all the traditionally locked up, hard-to-use ATS data extensible. In other words, without having to spend an enormous amount of resources replacing your legacy ATS, ATS Bridge enables you to do things like modernize your on-site job search, offer a consumer-quality completely branded job application experience optimized for any device, create recruiting landing pages, and much more.

As a bit of background, our engineering team has been able to rationalize different ATS data sources into a common information layer. For employers with numerous operating companies and ATS vendors, not only do they get to offer a consumer-quality experience, this also means for the first time ever they can allow candidates to search all of their jobs at once—from a single system of record. This is huge from a user experience perspective.

We’re really excited to announce ATS Bridge. If you’d like to see how it can help to transform your complex, outdated ATS environment into something that will completely wow candidates, then let us show you a quick demo. Click here to schedule a 15 minute meeting with one of our specialists. Candidates are losing patience for outdated candidate experiences. It’s time to give them what they expect.